Hi all, currently I am a student, touched G3B using DBS vicker + cdp.
If I wish to invest in us market, would yr recommend IB, Fsmone, scb or vickers? [...]
Any advice? So far I see that IB is better than the others due to commission fee. However was taken aback by the dividend part, under 100k and the inactivity costs.
If you want to
invest: use Stanchart, but also, don’t try picking stocks until you’re comfortable investing in simple, sensible ETFs. Gotta walk before you can run.
If you want to
trade—actively buying and selling—then use Interactive Brokers.
Reading Shiny Things' book..
Can't quite decide whether to go with SCB/IB for IWDA - any advice?
The rule of thumb is the same for you as for everyone else. If you’ve got over $100k USD to invest, or you can spend over $1k-ish USD a month, then use IB. Otherwise, use Stanchart.
For ES3, thinking of DBS Vickers Cash Upfront + sell with another brokerage
Why not just use FSMOne’s RSP?
Saxo have all the info you need clearly stated on the website, if you send a mail they actually respond and with the proper and detailed info. The UI is probably the best of the bunch.
The problem with Saxo is that they have stupendously high fees. In addition to their custody fees if you trade non-Singapore stocks, they charge an FX conversion fee on your trade amount of 0.75%
each way! That’s HUGE!
Do not use Saxo. I say this over and over again, but they have so many hidden fees and charges that nobody should ever touch them.
Hmm, then which broker should I use (for overseas markets)?
StanChart? IBKR (but $10/month very chor)?
For local trading/investments, FSMone?
I am a beginner with low captial buying CSPX for the long term and probably doing swing trading in the future. I know StanChart cannot short so maybe I have 2 active accounts?
OK, if you’re actively trading, the usual advice changes:
1) Use Interactive Brokers; and,
2) Don’t use CSPX; use the ES futures instead. If you’re looking to actively trade the S&P 500, the ES futures are more liquid, have tighter prices, and trade twenty-three-and-a-half hours a day.
what do u think of crypto?
saw that u are with Ripple now.
Yep, I work for Ripple—which is why I generally don’t comment on crypto markets.
hi ST,
what are you thoughts on investing in
IWDA vs VWRA ?
They’re both perfectly good. I lean toward IWDA, because VWRA is relatively new. Just pick one; they basically perform the same.
also, buying using IB, do we need to move our equities back into SG when we retire?
how is this process?
No. You can just sell them using IB, and withdraw SGD straight from IBKR into your bank account.
Know I might be missing something here, but getting IWDA 90%+EIMI 10% by own seems cheaper than buying 9-10 stocks of VWRA?
So there’s a subtle thing here. Those two choices—10 shares of VWRA, and 9 IWDA + 1 EIMI—have the same underlying portfolio, so they’d track each other basically tick-for-tick... in percentage terms.
As you’ve noticed, they don’t have the same dollar value. 10 shares of VWRA is $843. Nine IWDAs and one EIMI is $576. But if you put $10,000 into one portfolio, vs $10,000 into the other portfolio, you’d end up with basically the same profit or loss. You get fewer shares of VWRA, but each share is worth more. Both ways, you end up with the same amount of money invested in “90% developed markets and 10% emerging markets”.
Related but slightly different question: instead of emergency funds, what about money that's set aside specifically for spending in 5-8 years instead of long-term retirement -- since the timeframe is not long enough for investing in equity
I’d disagree with that. With interest rates as low as they are, five to eight years is long enough that you could use a standard “110 minus your age” rule to do the allocation—maybe with a shorter time horizon, though.
Let’s say you have a big, known expense coming up in five years; you could set aside a pot of money for that particular expense, and invest it as though you were five years before retirement, as if you were a sixty-year-old.
For this scenario where it's not some super long time horizon, do we need to care about the duration of the bond ETFs and mixing them to target some average duration?
Oh god no, not least because in Singapore there
are no target-duration bond ETFs. But also, this would be WAY over-complicating it. A simple rule of thumb is good enough:
If you need the cash in:
* Under three years: keep it in the bank.
* Three to five years: keep it all in bonds.
* More than five years: Keep it in a mix of stocks and bonds.
May I know why people are willing to buy negative yielding bonds? Isn’t keeping the cash under the mattress (in a very secure house!) a better investment?
Maybe if you’re a small investor, yep. But as soon as the amounts get larger... well, how big’s your mattress?
Imagine you run a bond unit trust and you have, let’s say, a billion euros that you have to invest in euro-denominated bonds. You can either leave it in the bank where it earns negative half a percent; you can buy a Microsoft bond that yields negative a quarter of a percent; or you can ask your bank to give you your billion euros in the folding stuff.
Even though the Microsoft bond has a negative yield, it’s still a quarter of a percent better than leaving it in the bank—two and a half million euros a year better!
Storing a billion euros in cold hard cash though: that gets difficult. If you take it in 100-euro notes, that’s about ten fully-loaded pallets of cash. You’re going to have to rent vault space to secure those, and that gets very expensive very fast. In fact, you’ll probably end up paying around one percent to vault that much cash (based on the costs for vaulting a similar amount of gold, which is much more compact, so it’s easier to store)… so you might as well just buy the Microsoft bond.
A few companies actually tried this when Eurozone interest rates first went negative—there was a brief run on vault space in Germany and Switzerland as people tried to do the mattress trade. It didn’t work, though; someone actually did the math and figured out that, because of how inefficient it can be to store giant amounts of cash, that interest rates could go as low as
minus two percent before companies and fund managers started doing the mattress trade in any meaningful size.
Does this affect decisions with respect to MBH / A35?
No. MBH and A35 don’t have any negative-yielding bonds in them.
I know there are differing views on this, but I'd just like to understand why some would recommend Singaporeans to buy ES3 just because it's their local ETF. I don't quite get why we should have exposure to the country we intend to retire in.
Because it’s a pretty good cost-of-living hedge. If Singapore’s economy does well over the long term, the stock market will (generally) do well too; so you won’t miss out on the gains if the economy does well and house prices go up, the SGD strengthens, cost of living rises, etc etc etc.
Now, there’s a lot of nuance here and a lot of objections (“it’s not a perfect hedge”; “but Singapore’s market is so small”). But as a rule, if you live in a developed market and you’re planning to retire there, it makes sense to have at least
some allocation to the local economy.
Not just because of its declining prospects, but also because I've bought a fair bit of local REIT ETF and this thread has taught me that there's massive overlap between the two...
The better option would be to sell the REIT ETF. REITs are just a subset of the Singaporean market; if you switched your money from your REIT ETF to ES3, you’d get a broader exposure within Singapore, and less concentrated exposure to the real-estate sector.
Thanks for sharing your experience, & please continue to post such fresh views.
Please ignore those losers here & don't put to heart. I suppose they are jealous of your performance?
Streetfighter, since you seem to be new: Chrisloh65 is not welcome in this thread, and please don’t engage with him in here. He’s an active trader who claims he’s done quite well for himself, which if it’s true is admirable—but this is not a thread for active traders.
He even has a fan thread, which he doesn’t post in even though he’d be very welcome there, because he wants the attention that comes from starting fights in
this thread. He has places where he can share his experience and his views, but he doesn’t use them, and that’s why he isn’t welcome in this thread.
